


A place for us

by ctimene



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Good Place (TV)
Genre: But please bear that in mind, Do good place AUs need a major death warning?, I vote no, M/M, Pining, Rating may go up, gratuitous feelings, the good place AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-05-10 08:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14733581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ctimene/pseuds/ctimene
Summary: Matt felt warm. He felt comfortable. He felt entirely at ease. He could not remember what he had felt like before this moment, exactly, but he had a strong sensation that it was not this.





	1. Chapter 1

“Matthew.” The man’s voice was tenor, rounded and mellow. It bounced pleasantly off the walls of the room, mapping out the space, from the soft-to-touch but pleasingly firm leather sofa Matt was sitting on to the door the other man stood in. The voice had a smile in it too. It was utterly unfamiliar, but still somehow comforting. It seemed well matched to the man himself, who was on the older side, but spry, tall, and smelled distinctly of sunlight, fresh laundry and total contentment.

Hmm.

Matt felt warm. He felt comfortable. He felt entirely at ease. He could not remember what he had felt like before this moment, exactly, but he had a strong sensation that it was  _not this_.

“Matthew, do come through.” Matt followed him through the doorway into — an office, he’d guess, from the plush carpet, the smell of pine. For the first time he realised his cane was missing, though his glasses were still on his face. Luckily, the chair was right where it should have been — perfectly situated, in fact — and he was able to find it and take a seat with only the lightest of touches.

“I must tell you. You are dead.”

“Oh. Right.” A silence fell. A perfect silence — which, it turned out, was not silence at all, but a melody of birds singing, bees buzzing, flowers unfurling outside the window and not a single heart beating. Not even his own. Yes, dead seemed about right. There was a lot less blood than he’d been expecting.

“And you would be?”

“Oh, how remiss of me! I’m Michael.”

“The arch-”

“-itect. Architect. Sorry, the Christians only got about, mmm, 5 per cent of the afterlife right.”

“You mind telling me which 5 per cent?”

“Not at all! Well, Michael, of course. And the spiritual body after death — you were not in good shape, Matthew, really, you were not, especially after that building collapsed. But you can see for yourself, good as new now.” Matt smiled, nodded and started thinking, fast. “Oh, and one more thing they got right: there is a Good Place, and a Bad Place. Not exactly as the Bible has it, but they got the gist of it.”

Matt blinked, twice, and smiled again. His jaw was starting to ache, and it felt more familiar than anything else so far. “And this would be…?”

“Oh, my office is more of a waiting room. But you must forgive me for keeping you in suspense. Of course you’re in the Good Place, Matthew. After all you’ve done — dedicating yourself to the less fortunate, the toll it took on you, the way you died-”

He couldn’t remember how he died. But he remembered Midland Circle, and Elektra, and he knew how to extrapolate from incomplete data.

“-and, of course, your work with children in Sokovia is really what put you over the top, as it were. We’re very selective.”

Ah. Sokovia. Ah.

He wasn’t supposed to be here.

“Mm,” Matt replied, and tried not to grind his teeth. “You said this was a waiting room?” He smiled. He’d always had a disarming smile.

“Yes! Time doesn’t strictly speaking,  _exist_ , here, at least not as you knew it. Unfortunately, humans have this need for linear existence, even after death, so we preserve an illusion of time. And we find a gradual introduction to the neighbourhood helps a lot of residents adjust. But you’re right, we should get going. After all — gosh, I’m doing this in completely the wrong order, but I’m so excited for you both — you have a soulmate to meet!”

Matt froze. “A soul-”

“A soulmate! One person in all creation perfectly matched with you. Isn’t that nice? And they’ve been waiting rather a long time for you, in human years.”

“What do you mean?” Had she survived? Had he saved her? Or did Michael mean the time they had spent apart, relative to how little they had together. Somehow, he found it hard to imagine Elektra as actually dead.

(It was probably the supernatural coming back to life that had done that. He preferred his worldview with 100 per cent fewer zombies and dragons. At least he had been expecting an afterlife.)

“Oh, he lived rather longer than you did.” He. Right, of course, Matt wasn’t supposed to be here, so Matt’s soulmate wasn’t, well,  _Matt’s_. And, if he actually thought about it, the chances of Elektra reaching any kind of Good Place were… slim. Maybe Matt would’ve made it, if he’d accomplished more work as Daredevil-

Yeah, no, this was a cosmic fuck up. Nothing to do but roll with the punches and keep coming, like a real Murdock.

“Come with me.” Matt followed the other man’s — being’s? — footsteps through the doorway. As soon as he stepped through he felt sunlight on his skin, and the sounds and smells of a perfect park became much stronger and more focused than a single step should have made them. Matt suspected the rules of physics were not really applicable here.

“I should warn you, he may find your name a little surprising, or familiar — I’m not really caught up on human emotions yet, are those two the same? I keep getting all the -mused and -fused muddled up. A-mused, B-mused, Con-fused, In-fused- Gosh, there’s just so many of ‘em! And so many of you, Matthew Murdocks, so maybe give him a minute to adjust. Although, again, time is an illusion, so that might not help. Ah, here we are.”

Michael put his hands on Matt’s shoulders, equal parts paternalistic and patronising, and turned him to face the left. Matt had just enough of an instinct for self-preservation to keep from bristling at the touch. At least he knew  he was facing the right direction though.

“This is your home, Matthew.”

“Lovely,” Matt managed. There were wind chimes sounding in the breeze — at least three, and just enough out of tune with each other to be infernal. He had to push himself to listen past them and get a sense of the house beyond. From what he could tell it was a squat cottage, set in what must have been an especially lush garden. He could tell because the air was filled with pollen and perfume, the wind would not stop rustling through at least a dozen nearby trees, and the sounds were deadened by the force of so much foliage. Matt was used to echoes bouncing off concrete and brick  — lichen-stained stone was something almost foreign to him.

However, he could just about get the lay of the land and, sensing Michael had already moved up to the porch, he followed with as little trepidation as he could visibly show. The doorbell — distinctly a bell, not a buzzer — rang deep within the cottage. They waited. And then, footsteps on flagstones, and the panic rose in Matt’s throat faster than relief could chase it, and his hands curled into fists before he realised he knew that gait, that step, knew the voice grumbling “I’m coming, I’m coming,” and for a moment everything was perfect, everything was good, but then he remembered.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. His fists clenched again, and he shifted his weight, and he wondered how far you could run in a world built by the man made to catch him.

The latch went. Foggy opened the door.

_“Matty?”_


	2. Chapter 2

Despite, well, the sum total of his actions in life having led to a premature and particularly violent death, Matt’s instinct for self-preservation was, in fact, strong. It helped that he was a quick thinker. As Foggy took a breath to give the game away, Matt stepped forward as surely as he could manage on unfamiliar turf — quite literally, damn the lawn — and pulled him into a hug.

“Hi! Yes, I’m Matty. Wow, I feel like I know you already!” He shoved as much enthusiasm into the words as he could muster, teeth aching, then tucked his chin over Foggy’s shoulder, away from Michael, to mutter, “Please, please just go with this.”

Foggy didn’t have to say _oh boy_ for Matt to hear it in his sigh. He held Matt close though, put an arm around his shoulders like it was old times, buddies at the Bar, and Matt let himself feel a little safer.

“Did I tell you your soulmate’s name already?” Michael asked, sounding somewhere between perplexed and put out. “I could have sworn I was saving that moment.”

“Sorry Michael,” Foggy lied. “I didn’t realise it was meant to be a surprise, I asked Janet. But, hey, um, he doesn’t know mine yet, right, do you want to do that?”

“Fine,” Michael grumbled. “But it’s not nearly as much fun this way round. Matthew, this is Foggy Nelson. You probably heard of him during his run for New York state attorney general-”

Matt couldn’t help it, he beamed from ear to ear as Foggy shuffled uncomfortably next to him.

“-but of course, you died before the election, during the eighteenth alien invasion of Earth. Which is almost a shame, because with your charity work, you probably would have met at a fundraiser soon, and do you know how rare it is for soulmates to meet in life? The odds are one to 870 trillion against — you have a better chance of having competent legislative, executive and judicial branches of government simultaneously! In France!

“But, you know, had you met there it would have been spoilt by petty human things like the mortal coil, grief, and insufficiently high definition television. Here you have the whole of time to be together! Or rather, not time, time is still an illusion, but I can’t get into that, your minds will literally melt, I’ve seen it before, it’s disgusting.”

Michael paused and an uneasy silence fell over them all, interrupted only by the windchimes, until he clapped his hands like a showman. “Well, you must have a lot to talk about, so I’ll let you do that! Oh, there’s a big old welcome party tonight, by the way, I’ll swing by beforehand, give you the 911 on it.”

“I think you mean 411, Michael,” a woman’s voice said from nowhere, and it was only Foggy’s very tight grip around his shoulders that stopped Matt immediately throwing a punch. He turned to the source of the sound and there was nothing there, no presence, no warmth or echo, just a place where the rest of the world stopped providing him information.

“That’s Janet,” Foggy said, his voice too even to be natural. “She does that.” There was a slight sound and Foggy added, “And now she’s gone,” like he was remarking on it perfectly prosaically, not for Matt’s benefit. He was briefly, powerfully, swamped by longing, by _missing_ — he had missed Foggy, even if it had only been a slight estrangement, the end of a partnership softened by the same old bar, by a suit in a bag.

 _Get a grip, Matthew,_ he told himself. True, his memory was a little fuzzy around . . . the end, whatever it had been, although it must have been at Midland Circle. But he’d last seen Foggy, what, a few hours ago? It felt like barely a day had passed.

Hadn’t they only just said goodbye?

Anyway, it wasn’t like Foggy had died- Well, obviously Foggy had died. But they had both died, so in a way, that was . . . fine? Thinking about death — his own, Foggy’s, anyone’s — filled him with an almost upsetting calm. It was hard not to smile, despite the itch of panic under his skin, the constant threat posed by Michael’s twee presence.

He had not expected the afterlife to be this complicated.

Another of those uncomfortable silences was building, as Michael waited by the gate at the bottom of the garden. For what, Matt didn’t want to know. He couldn’t feel him looking, but his presence was becoming less comforting with every passing moment, every possible discovery. “See you later, Michael,” he called, as jovially as he could manage, before striding into the quiet house, dragging Foggy behind him.

Inside was cool and cramped. The echoes told him the ceilings were low, the hallway narrow. The floor was uneven flagstones — not crooked enough to trip him, worn almost smooth, but with rises and dips quite unlike the cracks of city sidewalks. He flexed his hands, missed his cane.

“Matty,” Foggy said, as soon as he closed the door, and Matt was reminded of the urgency of their — _his_ — problem.

“Fog, I gotta-”

“No, see, Matty, you’ve got that look on your face, like you are very much about to ruin the moment, so I am seizing it, okay? This moment, this is mine,” he said, stern.

Matt had to inhale quickly through his nose and purse his lips to keep quiet, but he complied with a curt nod. Foggy’s hands settled on his shoulders, and the weight pushed away some of the oddness of this Foggy, who smelled too young, who had no heartbeat, but in every other respect could be no one else.

Foggy took a breath, one of his slightly dramatic ones (like Matt could talk, he would have said, if Matt ever pointed it out), and Matt knew that whatever he was going to say, he meant, as fully as anyone could.

“It is _so good_ to see you again, old pal.”

Foggy’s voice cracked a little, at the end, and his words sounded damp, and when he took his hands away from Matt he rubbed one across his face, smothering the smell of tears. And Foggy sounded like himself, only ever himself, but also impossibly old, and tired, and without the weight of his hands everything in Matt’s world was off kilter again. The air was heavy.

Matt stood there for a moment, up against the force of _that_ , and tried to understand. The longing from before rose again, sensing an echo of itself, but it didn’t make sense.

 _He lived rather longer than you did,_ Michael had said.

Matt wanted to ask — he knew he _should_ ask, that the question hovered in the air — but there wasn’t time, he had to move, had to act, had to haul himself to safety, and Foggy was the only thing around to hold on to. So instead of responding, instead of giving that the reply it deserved, he said:

“I’m not supposed to be here.”

Foggy sighed. “Oh boy. Is this a guilt thing? I would like this to be a guilt thing, because I’m pretty sure the antidepressants here are going to be fantastic.”

“No, it’s a _There are several Matt Murdocks_ thing and unless that week in sophomore year I can’t remember was in fact us working in Sokovia with orphans, I am not the one Michael thought he was talking to.”

There was a gap of a few seconds before Matt practically heard Foggy’s brain latch onto the easiest part of the problem. “Yeah, no, you had the flu, and I don't know why you’re still paranoid about that, you made me swear on the Bible, which, looking back, pretty ironic now-”

Matt was rapidly losing what little patience he had. “Foggy, you’re babbling. I need planning, not babbling.”

“Planning for what? What am I supposed to come up with, Matt?” There was an exasperated edge to his voice that was a little too familiar. Foggy started pacing up and down the room, and Matt could hear it was barely large enough for him to get three full strides in before turning on his heel, hemmed in by large furniture that caught the echoes of his footsteps strangely. “I don’t know the rules here, I don’t have precedent. Look, maybe it won’t be a problem. Maybe they got things mixed up on their end, thought you were a different Matt, but they’re not going to kick you out, right? We can just tell Michael-”

“No!”

“Why not, Matty, c’mon, literally billions of people have died, this can’t be the first time two people with the same name got turned around on each other. So you’re meant to be in a different neighbourhood, whatever, I bet they’ll even let you stay because, you know, pals!” Foggy was smiling, he could hear it, but then he heard it drop away as well. “Or- Matt, do you think you’re not meant to be in the Good Place at all?”

He wanted to deny it. He wanted the disbelief in Foggy’s voice to be his own.

But he thought about the flagstones, uneven under his feet. The leaves rustling outside, deadening his perception of the world around him. His hand tensed around a cane that wasn’t there, and he noticed again the absence of dirt and dust and poison and fumes in the air, and he missed it. And beyond all that, beyond all the thousand signs of a world not made for him, he felt it, deep in the pit of him, that a man who had to crawl to confession every week spitting blood, that a man with the devil inside-

He was not supposed to be in the Good Place.

Foggy was still going. “You were a hero, Matt, a real one. A little, uh, rough around the edges, maybe, but you did good. You didn’t kill anyone. You-” Foggy was flagging now, and Matt wondered what he was remembering. The cost. The violence. “You were good, Matty.” His voice sounded smaller. 

“I thought so,” Matt said. “But not good enough. Come on, Foggy,” and he was guessing now, but guessing well, “think about the real me. Not the me you chose to remember.”

Foggy was very still for a long time, barely breathing. It occurred to Matt that they probably didn’t need to do that, not now, but each shallow exhale was a comfort in the absence of heartbeats. “Matty,” he sighed eventually, “if it were me — if I got to decide, you know, I know, you’d be first on the list.”

“Thanks,” Matt said, with half a smile. It was something.

After a quiet second or two, Foggy seemed to shake himself out of a stupor and grabbed a notebook from a cluttered pile of things crowded on a roll-top desk against the wall. “Okay, so, planning, yeah, obviously I’ll help, you’re my-” Foggy stopped suddenly, then sat down into an ancient armchair that gave a faint ‘whumfph’ and spat out a cloud of dust that Matt could taste.

He took a step towards Foggy, but was met with a raised hand that stopped him in his tracks.

When Foggy spoke, he was quiet. Small. “I just realised. You’re here by mistake. So… I guess you’re not my soulmate?”

Matt gaped at him, for just a moment, just long enough to feel that longing again, a squeeze on his lungs, before Foggy continued, softly, “No, yeah, of course. That makes sense.”

“Fog…”

“No, it’s- I just thought, you know, maybe soulmates are, you know, like we were. Are, I don’t know, maybe. Family. Partners. But, um, I guess it’s more like you and Elektra, Romeo and Juliet, die in each others arms type stuff.”

Matt turned his head away before he could think better of it, and tried to cover the reflex by reaching for the back of another chair. Foggy might not have had a heartbeat to hear, but Matt knew the cadences of his voice. Matt needed something to grip, something to feel, something that wasn’t the hurt in Foggy’s voice he’d tried so hard to hide. He let his fingers wander the over the chair, the studs in the fabric, the lace of the doily draped over the top, as if he was thinking over the idea, or of Elektra, or anything more innocuous.

And even then, when the right answer came to him, he hesitated for a second before allowing Foggy his out. “Yeah, must be. But we can still be, you know, our kind of soulmates.” Oh, that was the wrong way to put it. “I mean, we’re still Nelson and Murdock. I know we weren’t-”

Old habits died hard, and apparently letting his mouth turn down still provoked the same reaction from Foggy. “Hey, we were still Nelson and Murdock. In a sense beyond the literal, I mean. Just, you know, with fewer registered companies. And now fewer, um, lives, I guess.” Foggy chuckled to himself and got up again with the kind of exaggerated heave Matt remembered Edward Nelson doing, that one time he’d gone back with Foggy for Thanksgiving. “Nelson and Murdock, now with 200 per cent more ghosts. Who you gonna call?”

“There’s no one else I would ask for help.”

Foggy tsked gently. “There’s no one else you can ask. Okay. Planning, let’s plan. What are we planning?”

“Let’s start with how to stop me getting kicked out of heaven and go from there.”

“Okay, okay. Right. On it.” Foggy started shuffling through the papers on the desk again, a little aimless. Matt would have disregarded it entirely except that in a room of clutter that was unpleasantly undefined to him, Foggy was clear cut. So the moment he tensed up with an unwelcome thought, and then forced himself to relax, Matt felt his shoulders rise in mirrored tension, waiting for the blow.

Then, ever so lightly, like it was an inconsequential question: “So you’re going to stick around? That’s part of the plan?”

Matt bristled. He’d just said Nelson and Murdock, what part of that was hard to understand? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just a question, Matt, yes or no-”

“It’s not _just_ a question though, is it-”

“Actually, Matt, it is-”

“No, Foggy, you want to say something, say what you mean,” he sneered, a little patronising, and he knew it was the wrong choice as soon as he made it.

Foggy wheeled on him. “It means that’s not always part of the plan for you. Sticking around, showing up-”

“I was saving people-”

“And now you’re saving yourself! Which, look, I’m not saying don’t, but how are you going to swing this? Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, find somewhere to hide?”

“Like the Bad Place?” Matt asked, voice dangerous.

“No, just-” Foggy floundered, because in a way he was right. They didn’t know enough to plan for anything. “How are you going to stay here?”

In his anger it was easy for Matt to dismiss all idea of running, or hiding, and imagine he’d never considered those options. “I’ll just pretend. Play like I’m the other Matt Murdock, the-” good one, he didn’t say. “You don’t have to help me,” he added, knowing it was uncharitable, but feeling petty and angry enough to say it anyway.

“Of course I’ll help, honestly, but Matt, come on, this isn’t easy! What you’re saying is, we’re going to have to lie to everyone here, everyone we meet, while you assume a false identity? Cheesus, Matty, are you _sure_ this isn’t your own personal heaven?”

Matt set his feet, ready for a fight. “What do you want me to say- wait, did you just say cheesus?”

“Blasphemy isn’t approved of in the Good Place, Matt,” Foggy snapped.

The band of rage wound tight around Matt’s lungs disintegrated. The first blast of laughter bubbled up from somewhere near his solar plexus, but the second came from his knees and almost bent him double.

“Matty… what are you…?”

“Blasphemy,” Matt managed through tears of mirth, “isn’t approved of. In the afterlife. Even though all the religions are wrong about it.”

“Well, yeah, they’re all _wrong_ , but it’s not polite to mention i-” A giggle broke loose. Foggy’s resolve was tested and shattered. “Oh no, Matty, no, it’s ridiculous but we shouldn’t laugh,” he added, when he could get the words out.

Matt shook his head, hands on his knees. “We should absolutely laugh.” And, still doing so, he tugged Foggy in for a hug, chest still heaving, eyes wet. In that embrace, loose and boneless, all tension gone, it felt safe to say it. “I missed you, Fog.”

“Oh, Matt. You have no idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love to update six months later, very timing, excellent speed :/
> 
> (I've written the ending, if that encourages anyone. Just not all the bits between here and the ending...)


End file.
